This disclosure relates generally to transactional memory systems and more specifically to a method, computer program and computer system for recovering from transient failures by using transactions.
The number of central processing unit (CPU) cores on a chip and the number of CPU cores connected to a shared memory continues to grow significantly to support growing workload capacity demand. The increasing number of CPUs cooperating to process the same workloads puts a significant burden on software scalability; for example, shared queues or data-structures protected by traditional semaphores become hot spots and lead to sub-linear n-way scaling curves. Traditionally this has been countered by implementing finer-grained locking in software, and with lower latency/higher bandwidth interconnects in hardware. Implementing fine-grained locking to improve software scalability can be very complicated and error-prone, and at today's CPU frequencies, the latencies of hardware interconnects are limited by the physical dimension of the chips and systems, and by the speed of light.
Implementations of hardware Transactional Memory (HTM, or in this discussion, simply TM) have been introduced, wherein a group of instructions—called a transaction—operate in an atomic manner on a data structure in memory, as viewed by other central processing units (CPUs) and the I/O subsystem (atomic operation is also known as “block concurrent” or “serialized” in other literature).. The transaction executes optimistically without obtaining a lock, but may need to abort and retry the transaction execution if an operation, of the executing transaction, on a memory location conflicts with another operation on the same memory location. Previously, software transactional memory implementations have been proposed to support software Transactional Memory (TM). However, hardware TM can provide improved performance aspects and ease of use over software TM.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US20080244354 A1 titled “Apparatus and method for redundant multi-threading with recovery” filed 2007 Mar. 28 and incorporated by reference herein teaches a method and apparatus for reducing the effect of soft errors in a computer system is provided. Soft errors are detected by combining software redundant threading and instruction duplication. Upon detection of a soft error, errors are recovered through the use of software check pointing/rollback technology. Reliable regions are identified by vulnerability profiling and redundant multi-threading is applied to the identified reliable regions.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US20120210162 A1 titled “State recovery and lockstep execution restart in a system with multiprocessor pairing” filed 2011 Feb. 15 and incorporated by reference herein teaches a system, method and computer program product for a multiprocessing system to offer selective pairing of processor cores for increased processing reliability. A selective pairing facility is provided that selectively connects, i.e., pairs, multiple microprocessor or processor cores to provide one highly reliable thread (or thread group). Each paired microprocessor or processor cores that provide one highly reliable thread for high-reliability connect with a system components such as a memory “nest” (or memory hierarchy), an optional system controller, and optional interrupt controller, optional I/O or peripheral devices, etc. The memory nest is attached to a selective pairing facility via a switch or a bus. Each selectively paired processor core is includes a transactional execution facility, wherein the system is configured to enable processor rollback to a previous state and reinitialize lockstep execution in order to recover from an incorrect execution when an incorrect execution has been detected by the selective pairing facility.